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September 2014

As well as helping out with our drop-in workshop at the British Science Festival in early September, I also had the chance to give a talk as part of the Festival's public lecture programme. Over 75 people turned out early on Sunday morning to hear 'Seventeen or Bust: Solving hard mathematical problems with your help!', where I explained how the PrimeGrid project is working on a solution to Sierpinski's conjecture, a fifty-year-old unsolved problem in Number Theory, as well as finding record-sized prime numbers in the process.

Every year the British Science Festival (BSF) visits a city in the UK and engages the public with the latest and greatest science, engineering and technology. It is a fantastic opportunity for people to get involved in science and the programme contains a wide variety of activities to ensure the festival appeals to all ages.

This was the third year that EPCC has been involved with the BSF. We travelled down to Birmingham where we held an exhibition entitled “Supercomputing: From dinosaurs to particle physics” on the Saturday, which was aimed primarily at families. We were based in the Library of Birmingham along with a number of other highly-engaging events that all aimed to introduce the public to HPC and to encourage the next generation of computational scientists.

ISC is Europe’s biggest supercomputing conference, and EPCC has been represented at the event for a number of years now. More recently, as the interest in Big Data has grown, ISC has launched a new conference - ISC Big Data - which is specifically focussed on this new field.

I spent a couple of days last week at Imperial College's Department of Chemistry running a 2-day training course on CP2K. The course was hosted by NSCCS - the National Service for Computational Chemistry Software, and ARCHER - the National HPC Service we manage here in Edinburgh.

I've blogged before about the CP2K-UK project, a direct result of EPSRC's recognition of the growing community of CP2K users in the UK. Currently around £25,000 worth of CPU time is used per month on ARCHER for CP2K calculations, so it is important that users have access to the latest information on how to make the best use of the code.

The Fellowship Programme run by the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) could fund you by up to £3000 over a fifteen-month period to become Software Sustainability ambassadors within your research community (or communities if you belong to more than one). It can also allow you to share your expertise and advice with the SSI. The Programme will enourage you to develop your interests in the area of software sustainability (especially in your own area of work). And it's a fantastic and active interdisciplinary community to be involved with, as well as providing you with a great CV entry! The Fellowship is open to UK-based applicants. If you are interested then read on.